Speaking to mountain bikers and backpackers

21 Nov 2016

“New Zealand is full of trails that allow avid mountain bikers to “scream through the gnarl” and get into ‘the zone.”

This phrase may seem like it has been written in another language but for a select group of tourists – mountain bikers – this is their mother tongue, providing insight into the range and quality of mountain bike trails available in New Zealand.

Tourism New Zealand has redeveloped the mountain biking hub on newzealand.com to communicate directly with this target group, with information written by mountain bikers for mountain bikers.

The mountain bike hub has been launched alongside a new backpacker hub – and they both cater for travellers who have a very specific type of travel in mind.

“We have always had information on newzealand.com for these audiences but as we look to continually improve our online experience we recognised they weren’t as relevant as they needed to be. We redeveloped the hubs with the objective of talking to these two niche audiences with highly relevant content that is much more visual, inspiring and has more useful planning components,” says Andrew Fraser, Director of Marketing Tourism New Zealand.

Tourism New Zealand completed an external analysis with both audiences to look at who they are, what their needs are, what competitors were doing for these audiences, and who else outside of tourism was doing a good job of communicating with these audiences.

“For mountain bikers, we’ve tried to get into their heads and understand what drives them and what they’re looking for in a travelling experience based around mountain biking,” says Mr Fraser.

“For backpackers we’ve sourced and curated user-generated content to help tell our story in a more genuine way. Having backpackers who have actually been here and had the experience to demonstrate the story through their images and video content is far more compelling and real.”

Both sites were user tested with backpackers and mountain bikers and adjusted based on their feedback.